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Saturday, October 13, 2012

Going away for the weekend, freaked out by recent polls, holding my breath until Tuesday night...and so reposting one that got a little lost in the sauce, below.
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In an article
pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim
Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the
boomer generation against a broad indictment:

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our
Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney
to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation,
in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future
generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of
breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a
better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

Dad
makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general
terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called
"generation" for the course of human events, national and global. I
reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.
Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds,
I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.
First,
the basic premise. Generations are the ultimate granfalloon, Kurt
Vonnegut's term for an illusory community. Babies are born every
second. A baby born in 1945, just outside the traditional boomer
ring-fence of 1946-1964, would have a lot more collective experience in
common with someone born in 1946 than that '46er would have with someone
born in 1963.

I'll grant that those living through
epochal events like the Depression and World War II may be likely to
share some very broad psychological imprints not shared by those who
didn't live through them. But any age brackets placed around those
alleged to have been shaped by those events must be so approximate as to
border on arbitrary. And of course, the imprint of those events is as
varied as human circumstance and personality. In any case, given the
seamless continuum of birth, and the full age spectrum of responsible
adult actors (say, 18-85) at any given decision point, the boundary at
which one "generation" hands off responsibility to another is a mirage.
Moreover, the most key decisions any adult makes pertain to child
rearing, and as Bill Clinton is fond of asking, if the "Greatest
Generation" was so great, why did they raise a generation of alleged
self-indulgent fools and poltroons?

Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare
exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement
benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these
Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes
onto future generations.

To his credit, Tankersley
implicitly acknowledges that the problem is not that the safety net as a
whole is a hammock, but that benefits are skewed too heavily toward the
elderly. (He does not address the overall inadequacy of the American
safety net for pre-retirement-age adults.) He also acknowledges that
Social Security does not pose a serious budgetary problem. The
"entitlement indictment" boils down, then, to an inability thus far to
control healthcare cost inflation. There's no mention of the myriad
attempts to tackle that problem in the Affordable Care Act, or any
discussion of how that central economic challenge might effectively be
addressed. Instead, Tankersley simply exudes the fallacious meme that
morally laudable "sacrifice" would entail forcing seniors to assume an
ever-larger share of their own healthcare costs.

Further,
the core policies that Tankersley objects to were set in motion by
Presidents Johnson and Reagan: Medicare and massive tax cuts. If
benefits to seniors are over-generous, note that boomers have been
footing the bill for them for a full generation. The tax cut problem,
moreover, was effectively taken care of by President Clinton and the
103rd Congress -- though the toxic ideology driving the Reagan cuts
festered, grew more extreme, and returned with a vengeance in the
administration of George W. Bush. Ultimately, Tankersley's indictment of
"the boomers" boils down an indictment of W.'s administration:

... boomers chose short-term gratification when they had opportunities
to secure a better future for generations to follow. Classic example:
Instead of devoting the budget surpluses of the late ’90s to social
programs that desperately needed them, they voted themselves tax cuts in
2001 and 2003, and an expanded Medicare benefit shortly after—a move a
Congressional Budget Office study from that era suggests raised the
expected tax rate on future generations from 29 percent to 53 percent.
They borrowed heavily to cope with the economic sluggishness of the
2000s and, in so doing, inflated a housing bubble that, when it popped,
triggered the Great Recession.

For "they, they,
they," read Bush and the current GOP: "My father’s cohort has formed a
generational majority in every Congress since the dawn of the George W.
Bush administration." Well, yes -- and the W. administration was
sandwiched between the Clinton and Obama administrations, which have
labored pretty rationally to undo the budget-busting damage wrought
first by Reagan and then by W. U.S. voters -- so-called boomers along
with their elders and juniors -- have alternated the parties in power,
as they did throughout the twentieth century. We don't have a
generational problem -- unless you can find a way to pin the dangerous
extremism of the Republican party on an arbitrarily defined cohort of
adults born within an 18-year window ending in the year that extremism
made its first serious bid for dominance.

The implicit
Bush Jr.-equals-boomers equation points to Tankersley's broadest
fallacy: blaming broad historical forces on political decisions that
exacerbated but did not drive those forces. One such tidal pull is the
southernization and subsequent ideological purging of the GOP, set in
motion by the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964-1965. The
extreme anti-tax doctrine that Tankersley places at the center of his
indictment was a bacillus long latent in the GOP, unleashed by the
party's absorption of south.

Even more fundamentally,
Tankersley's blames macroeconomic changes, driven primarily by global
economic forces, on taxing and spending policies that exacerbated but
did not cause the changes. American wages have stagnated mainly because
of technological advances and global competition. To the extent that
policy has contributed, the chief culprit is probably the Taft-Harley
Act of 1947, which allowed states to enact right-to-work laws, weakening
the power of unions to set national wage standards. As for rising
income inequality, it's a global phenomenon, admittedly accelerated by
tax policies such as serial cuts in the capital gains tax and the
carried interest rule -- as well as by the long decline of union clout.

Tankersley
uses sleight-of-hand to cast boomers as the prime beneficiaries of
trends that policies that they allegedly chose helped drive:

The deal the baby boomers got from the Greatest
Generation wasn’t so raw, economically: Gross domestic product growth
from 1970 to 2000 was among the strongest in American history, and far
better than the average growth so far in the working years of
Generations X and Y.

First of all, boomers obviously
helped drive that growth. Second, the 1970-2000 period overlaps
substantially with the era of accelerating income inequality, from the
late '70s through the present, in which incomes for Americans in most
economic quintiles have stagnated. To the extent that policy choices
were malign -- the record is mixed -- and to the extent that poor
policies can be blamed for current economic ills -- only partially --
and to the extent that boomers can be held primarily responsible for
those policies -- very dubiously -- the alleged besetting sin of this
"generation" would appear to be not greed but gullibility -- belief that
tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy would advance national
prosperity.

Really, this sleight of hand is pervasive.
Boomers are in the first instance blamed for policies favoring the
elderly that did not benefit boomers through the bulk of the period
under discussion. They are not credited for the offsetting policies of
the first boomer president -- or the third. They are also not credited
with driving the productivity growth that characterized the core years
of the arbitrarily-defined cohort's adulthood, and they are cast as
beneficiaries, rather than as victims, of failure to share that
prosperity broadly across the population as a whole.

Moreover, while Tankersley pere
does point to gains in equality of opportunity for previously excluded
groups, left off the ledger (for Americans) are positive trends
extending through the boomers' adulthood: avoidance of major war;
maintenance of more or less pacific global leadership that has fostered a
great leap forward in global prosperity; reduction of death by violence globally; and reversal of the domestic crime wave of the seventies and eighties.

Finally,
Tankersley exudes a pervasive but unexamined pessimism, dinged only
momentarily by his father: "There’s no guarantee that young Max
Tankersley won’t grow up to enjoy
economic opportunities as sweeping as those his grandparents did.
Economic conditions change in unpredictable ways, my dad says." Very
true. Americans' economic horizons narrowed dramatically in the
thirties; it was not obvious then, as it is not obvious now, that a new
era of prosperity would offset long-trending declines in household
wealth. At the tail end of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt, having
reversed course after a disastrous dose of austerity inflicted early in
his second term, asked the country in his 1939 SOTU to believe itself capable of a new era of strong growth:

The other approach to the question of government spending
takes the position that this Nation ought not to be and
need not be only a sixty billion dollar nation; that at
this moment it has the men and the resources sufficient to
make it at least an eighty billion dollar nation. This
school of thought does not believe that it can become an
eighty billion dollar nation in the near future if
government cuts its operations by one-third. It is
convinced that if we were to try it, we would invite
disaster--and that we would not long remain even a sixty
billion dollar nation. There are many complicated factors
with which we have to deal, but we have learned that it is
unsafe to make abrupt reductions at any time in our net
expenditure program.

By our common sense action of resuming government activities last spring, we have reversed a recession
and started the new rising tide of prosperity and national
income which we are now just beginning to enjoy. If government
activities are fully maintained, there is a good prospect of our
becoming an eighty billion dollar country in a very short time.
With such a national income, present tax laws will yield enough
each year to balance each year's expenses.

We
currently have a president making a similar argument for targeted
investments in broadly shared future prosperity -- with what result who
can say?

To my mind, it's an open question whether the
U.S. is on the brink of a new era of prosperity or near the top of a
long decline -- whether income stagnation, income inequality, and
concentration of political power in the hands of elites are trends that
we will reverse, as we did in the postwar era, or that will continue
until our democracy is nominal, and opportunity, for most of the
population, is notional. In neither case, however, will the primary
story be one of generational conflict or generational depravity. We are
all made of the same dough.

2 comments:

Am I the only person who read the end as him essentially knocking down his own argument on purpose? When he says that X isn't doing any better so far and isn't poised to do better any time soon?

It seemed like the entire point of the piece was to take the anti-Boomer arguments of my (X) generation to their well-argued, fact heavy extreme and then say, "But we're all parasites in the end and we're all terrible", thereby absolving the Boomers of the blame he had just spend the piece arguing for.

Thanks for highlighting that semi-self-deconstruction that Tankersley inserted at the close, Ian. I did mean to deal with it, and thought more than once of adding a postscript. My impression, though, is that that final warning doesn't call the frame in question. To the extent that our species fails, it still fails in "generations," and some do better -- might be deemed "better" in some ultimate moral sense -- than others. I read it more as a 'never do as we have done' warning than a demolition of the core premise.

About Me

I'm a media consultant with a lasting interest in how democracy works, how it malfunctions and self-corrects. My working assumption is that you can't fool all the people all the time -- at least, not in Fox News's current stage of development.
I have a Ph.D. in medieval English literature and a propensity to parse the rhetoric and logic of our political leaders as well as that of media pundits and scholars who jump into the national debate. I wrote a dissertation on the remarkably humane and subtle medieval English anchorite Julian of Norwich, a mystic nun whose knack of squaring circles and framing paradoxes reminds me a little of our current president. A sampling of that work (mind the google gaps) is here: http://bit.ly/OzwsrR